Cake with figs, hazelnuts and basil "Pandeẑena" 500g

The Pandezena is poised to become the new tradition. A dessert invented a few years ago by Vincenzo Drago, the founder of the eponymous Drago Forneria Genovese, it combines classic elements of Genoese pastry with new ideas, but always linked to the local culture of the area. 

In the type of dough, we can find a soft friability characteristic of the low Genoese pandolce, but the shape - in this case a doughnut shape - changes, as does the texture of the surface, which becomes crunchier thanks to the sugar crystals. 

While until now other Genoese pastry chefs had gone so far as to use chocolate instead of candied fruit and sultanas, in this cake we find candied figs, hazelnuts and, above all, basil: an unusual choice but at the same time in the tradition with ingredients typical of local Ligurian cuisine. 

The flavour then is pleasantly aromatic with an unmistakable fresh note.

Genoese confectionery has always been renewed over the years. Suffice it to say that the Genoese Pandolce, which today many think of as the traditional one, the low one, was actually invented only at the end of the 1800s to speed up the rising time of what we now call 'high', while maintaining the same quality (and in fact it was an immediate success). The Pandezena is the next classic on the festive table.